Second Opinion | Curse of Chucky

by Scott Sparks

I watched Curse of Chucky, and it was not good. I went into this one blind, I hadn’t read anything about it or watched any trailers, I just saw a Chucky movie so I picked it up hoping for the best. And I was disappointed. I know it was wishful thinking but I was really hoping this was a remake, I just wanted to start over no more Tiffany no Chucky junior just a fresh start for a beloved character. And when Chucky appeared without the scars and stitches from the last two insults to the character, I was excited. Had they at least retconned Bride and Seed? Is this the real sequel to part 3 we’ve been waiting for? No. No it wasn’t. This was just another sub par sequel in a now defunct series.

My major complaint with this movie is it wasn’t a horror movie. This was very much a suspenseful thriller. Sure it got pretty violent towards the end, but the majority of the movie was just jump scares, and the writer/director trying unsuccessfully to build suspense. This was a Chucky movie, but Chucky didn’t show up until the movie was almost over. Ok technically he was in the movie the whole time, but it was him pretending to be the doll. Nobody wants to see that, we want Chucky brandishing a kitchen knife,we want the quips and puns and Brad Dourif’s iconic laugh. Instead we get a story where a kid is the only one that knows he’s alive and she doesn’t realize he’s evil and everybody thinks she’s being silly when she talks about the doll doing things dolls can’t do. That plot worked in Child’s Play, but 5 movies later it just ain’t cutting it. At this point we watch these movies to see a killer doll killing, not being drug around by a kid that doesn’t think it the least bit odd that her doll is alive.

My other major complaint is this movie took everything we’ve learned in 5 movies, all of the Chucky lore and it drug all into a big pile then took a giant, steaming, loose crap all over it. We’ve been told since the first movie that if Chucky doesn’t put his soul into another body in a set amount of time he’s stuck in the doll body. The doll body becomes partially real, he feels pain, he bleeds and he can be killed if he stays in it too long. But this movie said, “Nope, we’re not doing all that” and made him just a living doll that can’t be hurt. At one point he’s decapitated but there’s not a drop of blood, he then picks his head up and just sticks it back on. He still has the bloody scars on his face from the other movies so the movie recognizes that he was vulnerable at one time, it admits that he has had brushes with humanity in the past but then just ignores it. Why even bother mentioning the other movies if the rules from them don’t apply anymore?

I wanted to like this movie, I really did. And honestly I can’t say it was a bad movie, I did enjoy the nods to the older movies. And it did a good job of tying itself to the rest of the series. It even served as an origin story of sorts in flashbacks showing us what happened right before the first Child’s Play movie. But to be that true to the others, to try that hard to be a part of the bigger picture only to throw it away by disregarding a very important part of the lore ruined the whole thing for me,

Bottom Line

It was better than the last two movies in the series,though that's not saying much.